The Move West to Zion
In 1846 the Spilsburys, the Browns, the Butlers and the
Redds were all in or near Nauvoo at the time when the Prophet Joseph Smith and
his brother Hyrum were martyred and the main body of the Saints, lead by
Brigham Young, fled the continued the persecution in Nauvoo and moved west to
the Salt Lake Valley by way of Winter Quarters in Nebraska. The Spilsburys, the
Browns, the Bulters and the Redds each joined the Saints in moving to the Salt
Lake Valley, although at different times and by different routes.
The Redd family, consisting of John and Elizabeth and their
six children, Moriah, Libby, Lemuel Hardison, John Holt, Mary Katherine,
Benjamin, along with the two African American former slaves and their children,
crossed the plains in 1850 in the James Pace Company.[1]
They spent the first winter in Provo, Utah. The next they spring moved to
Spanish Fork and were among its first settlers. They built the first sawmill,
which was then promptly burned by hostile Indians. This was the beginning of
what was called the “Walker War.” Lemuel, now a teenager, was assigned to the
group charged with defense against the Indians. His father John assisted in
erecting a fort that the community families lived in the many years for
protection.[2]
In 1852 the Butlers came across the plains as members of the
Kelsey Company. The company was largely composed of Danish Saints and John was
put in charge of leading that Danish group. These Danish Saints knew absolutely
nothing about handling an ox team and the other basic pioneering skills
required in this journey across the plains. Although he knew no Danish and the
effort was not without frequent challenges, Butler managed to turn them into
seasoned ox drivers and Mormon pioneers. They arrived in the Salt Lake Valley
in 1852. Butlers went south and settled in the Spanish Fork area, where the
Redds had already settled a couple of years earlier. As they would all live in
the same fort for protection from hostile Indians. The families would become
well-acquainted and also good friends.
John Lowe Butler was a remarkable man. Most early converts
to the church lacked experience in wilderness survival and dealing with Indians
and hostile people and environments. But the church was also blessed with a few
tough, seasoned frontiersmen, but who were also religiously devote, whom it
could call upon to handle the dangerous and primitive situations in the West.
Butler was one of those.[3]
He lived through some of the most challenging times of the Church and served as
Bishop of the Spanish Fork ward for many years. He was also a writer and his
lengthy and detailed autobiography is one of the few of that era and of
significant historical benefit today.[4]
John’s wife, Caroline Skeen Butler, was also a woman to be
reckoned with. While by birth she may have been destined to be a pampered
southern belle, she would become a Mormon woman of substance, a faithful member
of the church, a good friend to Emma Smith while Joseph was imprisoned at
Liberty Jail, faithful and devoted to John and a resourceful and clever
pioneer. Because John was away for long periods of time on various church assignments,
Caroline ran the farm. This was not unusual for Mormon pioneer women at that
time, but also not an easy thing to do in a frontier pioneer environment. She
was known as a very skillful, clever woman. For instance, a neighbor cut off
his thumb while shearing sheep. Holding the thumb on with his other hand, he
came to Caroline and asked her if she could sew it back on. She said she didn’t
know anything about that, but she would try. She boiled some thread and with a
three-cornered buckskin needle sewed the thumb in place. She covered it with
turpentine, pine gum and mutton tallow (this was before antiseptics) and bound
the thumb with scorched strips of cotton cloth. It worked; the neighbor’s thumb
healed and knitted itself back to the hand. It is a telling incident, not only
because it demonstrates her cleverness and skill, but also because it says
something about the reputation she had earned in that community; the neighbor had
asked her genuinely thinking she could do it.[5]
In 1856 Lemuel Hardison Redd, the son of John and Elizabeth
Hancock Redd married Keziah Jane Butler, the daughter of John Lowe and Caroline
Skeen Butler. Having lived together in Spanish Fork for many years, the
families knew each other well. Shortly after their
marriage, Lemuel and Keziah were called by church leaders to help settle Las
Vegas, Nevada, something referred to as the “Muddy”. The purpose of this
mission was to help open the lead mines in the area to local settlers and learn
more about and make peace with the local Indians. The whole endeavor was a
failure for a number of reasons, including difficulty in building roads in the
rocky terrain and intense summer heat, the fact that the mines in the end were
not successful, and finally that they were also never able to make contact with
the Indians. The mission was abandoned and the Redds returned to Spanish Fork,
Utah.
Then, in 1862, President Brigham Young asked
Lemuel and Keziah to again settle in southern Utah. The Seveys and Paces from
Spanish Fork were also called to this mission. By that time the couple had four
children, including Mary Jane Redd, born on April 27, 1858, in Spanish Fork. That
spring the family moved to Harmony, where the Seveys and Paces had already
settled. That settlement, however, had been washed out by a storm earlier in
the year and the settlers were then moving to a new, higher area known as “New
Harmony.” This was where the Redds would live for the next eight years. In New
Harmony Lemuel again met John D. Lee, who was one of the missionaries who had
originally taught the Redds the gospel in Tennessee. In New Harmony Lemuel also
marred a second wife, Sarah Louisa Chamberlain in 1866. Keziah and Sarah got
along well and in fact Keziah may have had a hand in picking Sarah as the
plural wife. Needing a larger house, Lemuel purchased from John D. Lee a large
partially finished two-story home located in the foothills of the Pine
Mountains.[6]
It was in New Harmony on this large farm and among nine brothers and sisters of
Keziah and 12 from Sarah Louisa that Mary Jane Redd, Fern’s grandmother, would
grow up. She remembered it as a very happy time.[7]
Like John Butler, Lemuel was a true Mormon
frontiersman. When he crossed the plains with his family in 1850 he was
fourteen and drove an ox team, and in fact was one of the better ox team
drivers teaching others how to do it. He was a soldier in what was known as the
Walker War with the Utes in 1853 and in the Black Hawk War in 1863, and was
part of an army commissioned to track the Indians in southern Utah and make
peace with them, or at least discourage them from attacking the Mormon
settlements. [8]
He was among the scouts for the famous “Hole
in the Rock” trail through Glen Canyon for the settlement in San Juan. In 1879
eighty families were called to colonize the valley of the San Juan River in
southeastern Utah. They left in early October on the roughly 300-mile journey
over rough, unsettled country. The party reached the western rim of the canyon
above the Colorado River without much difficulty, but could not identify a
suitable place to cross and could not even find the San Juan River among the
endless twisting canyons. A scouting party consisting of Lemuel Redd, Sr. and
three other men were sent on a scouting party to find the San Juan River valley
and locate the most suitable places for building a road and crossing. On
December 17, 1879, they took off on what they expected to be a 60-mile journey
with food and provisions for eight days.
It was snowing and the weather had turned bitterly cold. They ended up
traveling in three feet of snow through trees so dense they were often not sure
which direction they were going. By Christmas Day they were almost out of food,
cold, tired, discouraged, utterly lost and with no idea how to find the San
Juan River canyon among the many leading off from the Colorado River. The next
morning Lemuel awoke refreshed, revived and hopeful. He told the others that if
they would follow him up to the top of a nearby knoll, he would show them the
San Juan River. They did and he did; from the top of that knoll they could see
in the distance the waters of the San Juan River. Lemuel had been shown that
spot and the direction they should travel in a dream the night before. They
made it back to the company on January 10, 1890. Their planned eight-day trip
had turned into a 28-day journey, the last four without food, but they had
blazed the trail that would later become the road and the means to the
settlement of what we know today as Bluff, Utah.[9]
With Mary Jane Redd growing up as a young woman in New
Harmony, Utah, we return back to Nauvoo in 1846 and the Spilsburys.
[1]
The presence of African Americans
among the early Mormon pioneers seems surprising, since they were rarely
mentioned in pioneer histories, but not as unusual as it my seem. Soon after
the Redds settled in Spanish Fork the older of the former slave women, Chaney,
died and was buried in the Spanish Fork Cemetery. We have no real information
on her daughter Amy. However, the other daughter Miranda, who was described as
“slim, happy and very attractive,” married another former slave named Alex
Bankhead. They lived in a small adobe home in Spanish Fork and had a son named
Billy, who grew up and moved to Salt Lake where he worked in the homes of the
wealthy. Marinda, who was known as “Aunt Rindy,” seems to have been well liked
in the community. She died in 1902 and was buried in the Spanish Fork Cemetery.
Venus was the second of the two African-American women that came west with the
Redds. She had been given to Elizabeth Hancock as a wedding gift by her father
Zebedee Hancock to be her maid. As noted, she was freed by John Redd in
Tennessee, but decided to remain with the family. Apparently, she and the Redd
family were devoted to each other. Mary Jane Redd Spilsbury said: “Venus had a
beautiful voice and sat in the Spanish Fork choir for many years. My fondest
memories of her is seeing her in her seat at church every Sunday dressed in a
red velvet gown, her eyes rolling and her mouth opened wide as she sang the
gospel songs she loved.” The Redd family was devoted to her. She had a great
desire to go to the temple and when told it was closed to African Americans
(Negros) she scratched her arm until it bled and said: “See, my blood is as
white as anyone’s.” Her son, Luke went with the Lemuel Redd family when they
moved to New Harmony and lived there until a grown man. Kate B. Carter, “The
Negro Pioneer,” Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, Lesson for May, 1965 497,
521-523 (copy available at familysearch.org on the documents page for John
Hardison Redd (KWJC-FG5).
[2]
Nelle Spilsbury Hatch, “Stalwart” 559.
[3] Hartley Preface ix.
[4]
Hartley, Preface x.
[5]
“Life Story of John Lowe Butler” available at
familysearch.org on the “stories” page for John Lowe Butler (KWJC-HXZ);
Hartley, 350.
[6]
Lee had been involved, and
indeed was then alleged to have been a key leader, in the tragic Mountains
Meadows Massacre that occurred not too far from New Harmony in 1857. Federal
efforts to prosecute the perpetrators had been interrupted by the Civil War,
but with that war now settled, the federal government had renewed those
efforts. Lee had decided to make himself scarce by moving from New Harmony to
the remote area of Arizona along the Colorado River, establishing what is now
known as Lee’s Ferry and Lonely Dell. Lee’s Ferry is now best known as the
starting point for boat trips down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
[7]
C.S.M. Jones LLC, Family Heritage
Consulting, “Lemuel Hardison Redd,” written for the Hole in the Rock Foundation
and available at familysearch.org in the
stories section for John Hardison Redd KW8Z-7GX); Hatch, 1-16 (Chap 1). The happy times at the
prosperous and successful farm in New Harmony would not last. Lemuel was not a
polygamist and was being sought by federal agents. This would cause him to move
to San Juan and then to Colonia Juarez for sanctuary, dividing his time between
Keziah and children in New Harmony and Sara and her children in Mexico. Deprived of proper attention by this hectic and
clandestine lifestyle, the New Harmony farm suffered. Keziah died of cancer in
1895, and Lemuel then sold his interests in New Harmony and became a permanent
resident in Mexico. Hatch, Stalwarts, 561-562.
[8]
C.S.M. Jones LLC, Family Heritage
Consulting, “Lemuel Hardison Redd,” written for the Hole in the Rock Foundation
and available at familysearch.org in the
stories section for John Hardison Redd KW8Z-7GX); Hatch, 1-16 (Chap 1)
[9]
Hatch, Stalwarts, “Lemuel Haridson Redd
(1836-1910) 561-62 (by Nelle Spilslbury Hatch); C.S.M. Jones LLC, Family Heritage Consulting, “Lemuel Hardison
Redd,” written for the Hole in the Rock Foundation and available at familysearch.org
in the stories section for John Hardison Redd KW8Z-7GX).
No comments:
Post a Comment